Poking about in Bridgend

Nothing exciting to report from East Glamorgan I'm afraid, but I have made a couple of brief visits to tetrad SS97J on the way home from working in the Alun Valley. Most of this tetrad is dominated by Bridgend and Waterton Industrial Estates, but mercifully there is a 100m stretch of the Ewenny River in the south-west corner which has a convenient riverbank footpath. This helped boost the tetrad total to 57 taxa, including Cinclidotus fontinaloides, Didymodon sinuosus, Hygrohypnum fluviatile and Fissidens crassipes on a riverside rock.

The most surprising find was the first moss I saw after getting out of the car - several cushions of Dialytrichia mucronata on a wall top several metres above the Ewenny River. I've not seen it in such an exposed location before.

The previous week I'd called in at Bridgend Industrial Estate and recorded a few grots. There are plenty of vacant plots on the estate, so it is probably worth another pit stop sometime to mop up a few more species...

Scapania paludicola and Matt's other finds

Matt Sutton has been busy in Pembrokeshire, looking for species that I missed whilst recording for The Mosses and Liverworts of Pembrokeshire.  He has made numerous new hectad records over the last couple of years, and found Ditrichum lineare new to the county in 2017.  Last year he made two additions - Bryum moravicum near Kilgetty and Scapania paludicola near Llangolman - as well as finding notably disjunct rarities such as Porella obtusata on the south coast near Saundersfoot and Cephaloziella turneri in a gully on the north coast near Strumble Head.  Although VC45 is probably the most intensely recorded county in Wales for bryophytes, diligent searching is bound to turn up new things.

Matt's Scapania paludicola is particularly welcome because it helps with a longstanding puzzle.  This species was thought to be very rare in Britain, but my CCW colleagues began finding it in pH-neutral mires across much of Wales and the Atlas suggests it is something of a Welsh speciality.  However, forms of Scapania irrigua mimic the leaf shape and arched keel of S. paludicola and I have long held a nagging doubt that the widespread Welsh plant might just be extreme S. irrigua.  This was not helped by the complete lack of gemmae on Welsh plants, unlike a couple I was sent from Scotland as Recorder for Hepatics.  Matt's find had dark gemmae, finally putting my mind at ease.  I am now confident that the Welsh mire Scapania really is S. paludicola.  Matt's plants were alongside typical neutral mire species: Sphagnum papillosum, Aulacomnium palustre and Straminergon stramineum.

Bonfire fungus

I've been checking Funaria-covered bonfire sites for fruit bodies of bryoparasitic fungi for ages, so I was pleased to finally spot some little orange apothecia near the car park at Cwm Llwch (Brecon Beacons) at the weekend.

Using the bryoparasitic pezizales website, the large, smooth, elliptical spores are a good fit with Octospora excipulata (web link here), which seems to be the commonest of the three fungi recorded as parasitic on Funaria.

Little apples again

A weekend at a camping barn in the central Beacons finally allowed me the chance to stop at Craig y Fro to check out the much-visited colony of Plagiopus oederianus. It was fruiting well behind the little holly bush, along with plenty of other nice calcicoles nearby.

 

Fissidens crassipes subsp. warnstorfii?

I popped out at lunchtime to finish off tetrad SO30C which I started late last year. My 2018 visit focussed on upland-edge woodland and streams, so today's targets were species of walls, tracks and trees. The canal bridge at Goetre (SO314057) seemed as good a place as any, and produced 32 additions to the tetrad. Highlight was what I thought was Fissidens fontanus submerged in the canal - a single 2x2cm tuft of long, narrow shoots about 2cm below the water surface.  However, I could see a leaf border through the hand lens and I didn't think F. fontanus was bordered, so I collected 3 shoots for checking.

 

Sure enough, Fissidens fontanus is unbordered, and working my plant through the key in Smith took me to F. crassipes.  The canal plant was unlike any F. crassipes I had seen before, and I am very familiar with the short (<1cm long) plants of this common lowland moss.  Just in case, I checked the text in the European guide of Frahm & Frey (ed Blockeel), and there found three infraspecific taxa of F. crassipes.  One of these - var. philibertii - matched the canal plant very well, with shoots >2cm long (vs up to 1cm in var. crassipes), and with the upper part of the lamina shorter than the sheathing part.

 

the two blue bars are the same length, showing the upper part of the leaf
is shorter than the sheathing part

Frahm & Frey mention four synonyms of var. philibertii: var. submarginatus, Fissidens warnstorfii, F. mouretii and F. sublineaefolius.  This showed that several people have considered this taxon to be sufficiently different to typical F. crassipes that it deserved species rank.  A quick check of Tom Blockeel's account in the Atlas indicated that this distinctiveness is currently recognised at the subspecies level, with World Fissidens expert Maria Bruggeman-Nannenga calling it subsp. warnstorfii.  The Atlas describes this as a Mediterranean plant, and I have not yet managed to find any reference to it being recorded from Britain before.  I doubt that many of the boats that ply the canal have come here from the Mediterranean, but introduction via aquatic plants seems plausible.  Alternatively, the Monmouthshire plants might be a morph of subsp. crassipes that grew very tall under the shade of the canal bridge in last summer's drought, but if that is the case it seems surprising that it would so closely resemble the Mediterranean subspecies of this moss. 

Miscellaneous December mosses (and liverworts!)

Here are a few images of some interesting observations I've not found time to post about over the last few weeks of 2018:

A rubbishy record shot of Campylopus subulatus collected from a forest track at Gwaun Nant-y-bwch during an excursion with Charles on 11th Dec. This is just the third Glamorgan site.

Lopidium concinnum (Hypopterygiaceae) was the most conspicuous of four aliens noted on a Dicksonia antarctica 'trunk' in Swansea's Wyevale on 20th December. Heteroscyphus fissistipus was the only other species I managed to identify. All were recorded as live, although the exposed parts of the Lopidium shoots were dead/bleached.

On the same day I was at Wyevale, I did a quick check of the Kilvey Hill Cephaloziella calyculata colony, but failed to find anything resembling integerrima, the only only other Cephaloziella noted being divaricata. The colony was highly fertile, with male plants (photo) and gemmiferous shoots abundant (photo). Perianth development was, however, uniformly at a very rudimentary stage and well behind those of integerrima seen recently at Crofty. There are still plenty opportunities for exploring unsurveyed areas at this site - i.e. most of it!

The distinctively scented Lophozia bicrenata was found growing with Vezdaea retigera on mine spoil on Cadle Heath Common in Swansea on 21st Dec.

Lophozia ventricosa var. silvicola is occasional on Sphagnum papillosum on Cefn Bryn, 31st Dec. As reported by Sam in the Pembs Bryoflora, it seems this defunct, yet distinctive taxon is the default var. on Sphagnum in our area.

A good quantity of Marchantia polymorpha cf subsp. montivagans "Mountain Liverwort" was encountered mostly 'in stream' in a base-enriched runnel on Cefn Bryn, also on 31st Dec. The large thalli clearly lacked black midribs that characterise subsp. polymorpha, though were darkened a little, as shown by the example below, photographed in natural day light (it was almost dark by the time I got to this spot and to make things worst as I was walking back up the hill I realised I must have dropped my phone in the runnel - fortunately I did manage to find it before the light completely went, sitting amongst Montia in-stream, half soaked, but still working!). I failed to get to grips with the ventral scales of the Marchantia, but I will take another look before sending off a voucher for verification of this potential county first.